The Highwayman

Friday

Nov 5, 2010 at 2:00 AM

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 When Bruce MacDonald goes to bed at night, he repeats a sort of verse; you know, the sleep-inducing kind that curls back on itself: "It was a cold and stormy night and the Highwayman was crossing the mountain…

When Bruce MacDonald goes to bed at night, he repeats a sort of verse; you know, the sleep-inducing kind that curls back on itself: “It was a cold and stormy night and the Highwayman was crossing the mountain… Said one of his followers, tell us a story. He did, and it went like this: It was a cold and stormy….” These lines are repeated often throughout The Highwayman, becoming a kind of low-key mantra running through the pages of Arthur E. Stewart’s first novel.

Stewart, 84, of Eastham, is the former longtime building inspector in Orleans. To say he has the gift of gab would be understating it. In fact, this is the real problem with the book. At 527 pages, it bends under the burden of multiple storylines and a bewildering if amiable bunch of local characters. Bruce, a building contractor, and his wife and kids live in central Massachusetts, and the plot plays out in the mid-1950s, a hectic, rather cheerful time for the most part, to hear the author tell it. Bruce is the book’s narrative voice, and the plot doesn’t thicken so much as it meanders, which is a shame, because you can stick your hand – or imagination – into the mix and come up with the seeds of at least five meaty novels. What with a body in a swamp, ex-cons, errant dreams, an abandoned mansion with ties to Prohibition booze, local politics, a passel of nude drawings and, in particular, the will and legacy of one Jessie Willis, there is really too much to go around. “Crisis” and “resolution” get lost in a dense thicket of too many tales to tell.

A frequent lack of quotation marks, including commas and periods, could be an issue in this weighty tome, except that they sometimes lend themselves to a pleasant and frequently very funny stream-of-consciousness narrative. Which leads to the “but” in this review. Stewart has an uncanny gift for dialog – he writes exactly like people talk. Reading (and reading….and reading….) this book is to hear people talking in their ordinary life voices, living the scenes of their ordinary lives in just the way they’d be doing it if they weren't characters in a book. A hardy, patient reader can cull through three or four pointless pages about landing a trout and come up with a paragraph of witty, descriptive prose. Or slog through yawn-inducing paragraphs about building a house and win a few genuinely lovely sentences that say it all.

In the book, after Jessie’s will is read, Bruce describes the scene: “…there was a gasp. I looked at Mother and she was crying. I looked at Peggy she was crying. I looked at Janet she was crying. I looked at Colin and he pointed to the door and we both got up and went outside.” Yup. Sounds like exactly the way it could’ve happened.

Stewart is reportedly at work on a memoir about his career as a Cape building inspector. Take a persistent editor with a ruthless red pen and pair this with the low-key character development and humor of Stewart’s writing, and who knows what could result!

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